Many people spend hours on the mat, hours watching instructionals, hours in the gym and often they are left looking for an edge. Nothing replaces mat time, but proper conditioning and strength building are components of any athlete’s over all game and often the difference between winning and losing.
Of course running and weight lifting can help you develop sufficient cardio and strength to excel in grappling. What do you do when you are bored with those options, don’t have a gym near by, or believe (as I do) that running is harder on the body than an armlock and weight lifting is inefficient? You turn to non-traditional yet functional alternative training methods.
Below are several cheap, simple, and FUNCTIONAL exercises that will leave you exhausted while building relevant strength. There is AMPLE example and explanation on how to do the exercises that I demonstrate, so I (after demonstrating the exercise) take you through it’s BJJ/Grappling counterpart. Enjoy the exercises, and Happy Grappling! Click “read more” to see the vids.

5 Comments
Thanks for your videos.
I just got a Kaizen kettlebell and your videos had some good tips about how to apply the training to my BJJ.
Glad this could help. I plan on doing some other exercises with the kettlebell soon.
Nice post, Tim. I’m always very interested in solo exercises that complement BJJ - I have to admit I’ve never seen the slosh pipe. I agree wholeheartedly that just weightlifting is not an efficient training method for BJJ, although I have done plenty of it. I’m moving on to other whole-body exercises.
Tim, what weight kettlebell did you start with? I need to do something about the weight gain from the suburban married lifestyle, and I was thinking about trying the kettlebell.
I have a 35 pounder and a 25 pounder. I use the 25′er for my swings and the 35′er for my drags and Turkish getups.
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